“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

We may be born equal but we surely do not have the right to live and die equal.

Why should it mean anything to me that my neighbors have a much greater chance of dying early because theydon’t have health insurance, and that my own family has to scramble to keep ourselves covered when we need to change jobs, or that we have to pay spectacularly high fees? Necessity is the mother of invention, is it not? Even if it comes at the price of a preventable death or two, or three, or….

Why should I care that the government — ruled by truly benevolent big business — invests next to nothing, or less, in preventive health care? Aren’t they saving me money? Saving us all?

My idea: call it compassionate consumption, or compassionate cannibalism. Maybe a corporation could get a charter to run a business that identifies the weakest among us, beginning at, say, age thirty or forty — or, hell, any age — and then harvest these ill, or maimed, or mere weaklings for amputation or termination and processing into food, or a broad abundance of other commercial products.

Surely this plan would help ease insurance rates since the sick would not be using up all the funds. And the profit of such an industry would be good for the economy.

After all, the U.S. has the most expensive and profitable health care system in the world even though it does not come close to covering everyone — a remarkable accomplishment of which any CEO and good citizen should be proad to boast.

Since treatment is available often only for those wealthy enough to afford their health care plans, which leaves out in the cold an awful lot of John and Jane Does, I ask that rulers in both the private and public sectors both, along with good voters, show some compassion for us Dimslows — harvest the ill and injured.

There are plenty of possibilities for compassionate consumption. If the internal organs of a person to be harvested are diseased, then, say, the skin could be used to make car seats.

Or if a person has skin cancer, which leads to harvesting, then make use of the internal organs for, say, dog food, until the advertising industry gets up to speed and successfully markets upscale cannibalism of select organs to the highest class of fine diners — those who in any case are used to living off the backs, the more traditional sacrifice, of those of low income.

The pharmaceutical companies may scream that this will cut into their stupendousprofits, but it seems to me that they, like anyone, could use a little more competition in the cutthroat, so to speak, free market.

We just need to make sure that the government doesn’t get involved in the body harvesting and processing business, since government sector work is more likely to be unionized than private sector work, and having unions almost always means better wages, more vacation time, and other benefits, like health insurance — and it wouldn’t seem right to have health-insured and at least modestly well paid workers doing such a job.

I mean, we have to have standards.

Let ill and poorly compensated workers harvest and process the ill and maimed, who are themselves so often poorly compensated. It only seems Right.

Harvesting the ill for commercial consumption — is that a great Dimslow idea for correcting the health care crisis in America, or what? If I do say so myself.

I mean, the alternative is to just let people suffer, and force them into the agonizing decisions of trying to decide whether or not to buy medicine or food or electricity or heat or fuel or shelter or transportation or education, and so on. And that’s not a very nice thing to do to our families and neighbors, now is it?

Better to kill them early for their own sake, and for our own peace of mind as well. And kill them also, let’s not forget, for the glowing good health of the economy. And kill them too for the logic and wisdomof the big dollars that rule our political system. It only seems Right.